Category Archives: Current Events

Let me tell you about my first exposure to Libertarians and my bewildered response to the hate he received:

We
had an all candidates debate at my school when I was 18, it was my
first opportunity to vote and I was EAGER to get in on that. I loved
politics and was an avowed liberal (not a hippy)

So each of the
candidates came up and said their piece and debated some of the issues
of the day; the Libertarian candidate was a nebbish, bookish fellow who
extolled the value of simply being in charge of your own life and the
role of the government as a means to enforce contracts and keep society
safe and thats about it.

I was wowed; I think I identified with
him (being bookish myself) but when it came time for questions people
sort of forgot who else was there and took the opportunity to tear this
man a new hole to crap from. He left bruised and I left confused. Why
had so many people just attacked him?

This predates the Internet
and it might shock some; but in some schools they didn’t push Ayn Rand
on you. So my exposure to his ideas was well, non-existent up until
that point. I was a devoted liberal and pretty much a hard core
socialist; but the idea of “owning myself” was interesting.

So I had decided to vote Libertarian if only because I felt bad for that guy who I identified with more than anything else.

It
wasn’t until later when I read more of his written stances that I came
to understand him better. First and foremost he believed that Abortion
should be illegal (which I suspect is why he got in the door of my
school in the first place, but I digress) and that women were as much a
part of a mans property as his farm equipment and so on.

Now. I understood why he was disliked; he was some kind of kook. Fair enough.

In
the 21 years since I haven’t actually come across a Libertarian who
wasn’t also the same kind of kook; mostly they were “rugged individuals”
who had some sort of hobby horse grudge against society (be it taxes,
drug laws, tort law, regulation, abortion, race, fees, the cost of
tickets online, what have you) and so they decide that the best way to
approach this complaint is to secede from society in some way. To
realize their own vision of freedom, away from “the thing that makes
society terrible”

It’s dressed up as “freedom from coercion” sure.
In ways it is. There is a belief that the tyranny of the greater
group will trample those of the individual or the minority; this of
course excepts that in the Western world at least, minority protections
exist. If someone is a genuine minority through no fault of their own,
they are protected. What is misunderstood is that Minority Opinions are
protected; but not necessarily supported or applied. And for some
people. this is unacceptable. So they become a “Libertarian” but since
(by definition) to be a Libertarian is to be a Dilettante and an
“Individual” there is no one single definition of a Libertarian that
fits.

Imagine for a moment a white plastic spoon in the middle of your living room floor, now imagine for every square meter of your home there is one plastic spoon. Now, alone, not so many spoons, one per meter, no big deal. Now imagine that for every spoon you see there is a dust pile made up of that same plastic, just under the carpet or in a corner.

So your house, with it’s spoons and its plastic dust is constantly accepting new spoons and plastic dust at a rate of 1 spoon a day and one pile of dust per day. You can’t stop that , it keeps happening because the people outside of the home only see the one spoon in the middle of the floor or the one little pile of dust in the corner, but they don’t see the one int he landing or the one under your bed, etc

It’s dispersed, it accrues in the animals and on the coasts, there is a VAST dispersed web of plastic and it hangs down into the largest area of our world that spreads over 70% of the surface.

But if it helps, imagine constantly finding dirty plastic spoons in your living room; and you can’t stop them from appearing.

It’s far past time that North America looked at itself and said “why have there been more civilian shootings here than in Europe”

If we believe the news out of Europe it’s crawling with insane Jihadists with bombs, knives and guns who are killing with impunity. The UK is a desolate wasteland full of bullet-holes and France was burned to give glory to Allah.

That’s what we’re being told. So North Americas gun issues are like nothing compared to the savage times in the Old World.

But that’s not true, is it?

The Guns come from the ‘States and spread out, like a pandemic. They are everywhere, and always nearby. Like Spiders or Rats, infesting the Western World, a social disease that gives only the infected any pleasure and makes the rest of the world walk on eggshells, less they get shot by an open carrier of the condition.

Europe is less than 2000 miles from war-zones, but doesn’t find itself dealing with nigh weekly mass shootings. What excuse does North America have?

This list annoyed me, mostly because it takes a conceit, then makes a list then makes the conceit fit. The Conceit being people value customer service over other things (or at least it appears to, I’ll not try to determine if that was where things started, but it appears to be the case)

Amazon didn’t win because of customer service. Amazon is difficult to use if you aren’t already familiar with how the Internet works. There are no sales people and no experts to tell you which is better when comparing things. You have to seek that out. Amazon is CHEAPER. That’s where Amazon won. It was cheaper than the store for pricey items and it’s fun to get things in the mail.

Netflix did kill Blockbuster; because it was more convenient to get DVDs in the mail and watch things online than it was to go to the store. Notice that online game rental services aren’t really tearing up the charts though? Yeah. but STEAM? BUCKETS OF MONEY. People like convenience, the late fees didn’t enter into it. If Blockbuster wanted to win, they would have opened mini stores in theaters and sold downloads of the movies that people had just watched and upsold Physical copies with special features.- Also DOWNLOADING killed Blockbuster, free and convenient? YES!

Uber makes money by not having to pay for licensing and maintenance. There. That’s not success, that’s piracy.

Apple didn’t invent singles, they negotiated the ability to sell them in a way that was convenient to people. Again, being able to buy things without leaving the spot where you are is always going to be better than having to go to a store. Had HMV made the same deal or better then Apple might still be the also ran they are.

Air BnB is Uber for houses. They sell you and make money from your property and you get some too. Yay!

All of these things have the same thing in common, someone is able to achieve their goal without having to leave the spot they are sitting in. When someone invents a viable teleporter you can wear as underwear people will buy it so they don’t have to leave the couch to drop a deuce. You get me?

It’s not customer service that killed the toilet paper industry, it was teleporting underpants.

I’ve come across this list; it’s by Charles Sykes; not Bill Gates. Bill Gates’ list is one entry “Be born to wealthy parents”

———-Whether you like Bill Gates or not…this is pretty
cool. Here’s some advice Bill Gates recently dished out
at a high school speech about 11 things they did not
learn in school. He talks about how feel-good,
politically correct teaching has created a full
generation of kids with no concept of reality and how
this concept sets them up for failure in the real
world.

RULE 1
Life is not fair – get used to it.

RULE 2
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world
will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel
good about yourself.

RULE 3
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out
of high school. You won’t be a vice president with
car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a
boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

RULE 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your
grandparents had a different word for burger flipping
they
called it Opportunity.

RULE 6
If you mess up,it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t
whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as
they are now. They got that way from paying your bills,
cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about
how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try
delousing the closet in your own room.

RULE 8
Your school may have done away with winners and losers,
but life has not. In some schools they have abolished
failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as
you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the
slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get
summers off and very few employers are interested in
helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people
actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for
one.

I’ve written my own list below with Better Rules that aren’t written by someone who has forgotten how to live.

Essentially; post install of Windows 10, the Screen is going to be on the ON-BOARD video; not your good video card, so you need to hook up an HDMI cable to the HDMI port on the back of your unit and proceed from there, then DISABLE that video card in Windows once you are done.

I’m in the midst of moving the site over to SSL/HTTPS for administration purposes at least. Which means changing my backend security and so on; which proved to be a bear where graphics where relative rather than direct links. Ah well. It’s working now. The Upgrade is working too! I have a valid SSL cert (I think) and it appears to be working.